How do I redirect the output to null?
You can send output to /dev/null, by using command >/dev/null syntax. However, this will not work when command will use the standard error (FD # 2). So you need to modify >/dev/null as follows to redirect both output and errors to /dev/null.
What does Dev null 2 >& 1 means?
/dev/null is a special filesystem object that discards everything written into it. Redirecting a stream into it means hiding your program’s output. The 2>&1 part means “redirect the error stream into the output stream”, so when you redirect the output stream, error stream gets redirected as well.
What happens when output is redirected to Dev Null?
5 Answers. The > operator redirects the output usually to a file but it can be to a device. You can also use >> to append. /dev/null is the null device it takes any input you want and throws it away.
What is the difference between the and >> redirection operators?
So, what we learned is, the “>” is the output redirection operator used for overwriting files that already exist in the directory. While, the “>>” is an output operator as well, but, it appends the data of an existing file. Often, both of these operators are used together to modify files in Linux.
Can you redirect stderr to stdout?
Redirecting stderr to stdout When saving the program’s output to a file, it is quite common to redirect stderr to stdout so that you can have everything in a single file. > file redirect the stdout to file , and 2>&1 redirect the stderr to the current location of stdout . The order of redirection is important.
Can you tail Dev Null?
To answer your question under what circumstances tail -f /dev/null might finish and therefore continue to the next line in something like a shell script: /dev/null (as with everything in Linux) is a file. When executing tail onto any file, the file must be opened using a filedescriptor.